Suddenly the world is concerned with regional security blocs again. Maybe it never went away and we have simply normalised it. Anyway, the sum of all today’s fears is the rise of China, and the “decline” of the West, including Euramerican security institution Nato. When on January 14 2019 former US president Donald Trump threatened to leave Nato, The New York Times reported it would “destroy” the organisation.
It’s certainly true that Nato would never have remained intact over the decades if it had not been for Washington’s leadership and money. Yet there were talks about Nato being a child of its time since the end of the Cold War, that it had become obsolete after the Soviet Union’s disintegration between 1989 and 1991.
Then along came Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his nostalgia for Russia The Great. Nato received a shot of military strategic adrenaline and awoke from its nap. By May 2022, a Washington Post columnist, military strategist Max Boot, wrote a commentary specifically thanking Putin “for greatly strengthening Nato”.
Then late in June, Nato heads of state and government of the North Atlantic Council in Madrid issued a statement indicating that the intention is to further enlarge and strengthen the organisation. “Today we have decided to invite Finland and Sweden to become members of Nato, and agreed to sign the Accession Protocols. The accession of Finland and Sweden will make them safer, Nato stronger, and the Euro-Atlantic area more secure. The security of Finland and Sweden is of direct importance to the alliance, including during the accession process,” the statement said.
With this putative expansion it seemed as if geostrategic issues superseded geoeconomic issues in the global political economy. With the focus sharply on China’s political-economic growth and concerns over a Chinese spread (not unlike that by Putin into Ukraine), new security alliances are starting to take shape thousands of kilometres from Nato in Brussels. By the end of June, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand — on the far side of the world — proposed greater “participation ... on a regular basis” with Nato, as Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida said in Madrid.
It is ironic that Nato’s main leader (the US) propelled the four Asia-Pacific countries to seek deeper engagement with Brussels, precisely because of concerns that Washington could no longer be relied on — mainly, though not exclusively, by the emergence of Trump’s “America first” policies. Trump also threatened to withdraw US troops from Japan and South Korea. Because of this, and the perceived threat from China, South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol sought a bigger security role and “co-operative relationship” with Nato — as a “cornerstone for solidarity”.
It does seem a bit absurd for countries as far away as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan to join a regional security-focused organisation thousands of kilometres away (with tens of states separating them), but they are driven by a single issue: fear of China.
In the days before the Madrid summit, Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg was firm in identifying China as “a challenge” to the interests, security and “values” of the European world, its outgrowths in the antipodes and allies in the Far East. While he sought “clear language” on Beijing, stating that China was “not an adversary”, he nonetheless insisted that Nato had considered “the consequences of China’s heavy investments in military capabilities, long-range nuclear weapons and efforts to take control of our critical infrastructure when we address how to ensure Nato will remain the most successful alliance in history”.
With this statement, it became clear that the Euro-Washington Axis is approaching the rise of China, and Beijing’s likely replacement of Washington as the global centre of power and hegemony, in historical as well as social terms (see Stoltenberg’s reference to European “values”). The political economic power of the US is slowly waning (though it remains militarily unrivalled, by a long way) and even the dollar is coming under threat as the global reserve currency.
This has prompted the Brics countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and SA) to discuss an alternative international reserve currency. For what it’s worth, there is nothing new about this. The dollar has failed to maintain the dominance it held for most of the past 70 years, prompting a shift away from the greenback, with central banks showing interest in non-traditional reserves such as the Swedish krona, the South Korean won and the Australian and Canadian dollars.
None of this explains the fear of China among the four Asia-Pacific countries. They are simply swimming against the flow of history, with an apparent hankering for the Golden Age of Capitalism — 1945 to the Richard Nixon shock of 1971, a shock I would argue may account for recurring banking, financial, currency and economic crises.
A more progressive and visionary position would be for the Asia-Pacific countries to embrace China in regional and global co-operation. Suddenly the idea that free trade and economic co-operation (a combination of Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant’s thinking) necessarily lead to peace seems a tad naive.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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